Nypon Soppa, or Swedish Rose Hip Soup

Nypon soppa is a Swedish dessert soup/drink made with rose hips and typically topped with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, or vanilla sauce (vaniljsås). It’s a dish that brings me instantly back to childhood, when my mom and I could whip up a batch in an instant thanks to the boxes of mix my aunt would send us from Sweden.

The ingredients in nypon soppa are minimal, and yet the fragrant smell of the rose hips can immediately conjure up an image of an abundantly green Swedish forest in summer, full of wild-growing fruits. With melting ice cream on top, the perfect spoonful combines both the hot floral soup with cool, creamy vanilla.

Wikipedia photo

Key among nypon soppa’s few ingredients are rose hips, which are the fruit of the rose plant that form after the flower has bloomed. The seeds inside are used to grow a new rose plant, but whole rose hips including the seeds are also used in a variety of other applications including herbal remedies, teas, desserts and drinks. (see Wikipedia entry on rose hips)

Ekströms is a leading brand that makes both instant and premixed refrigerated versions of nypon soppa. (Think the Scandinavian version of instant Jell-O pudding, as far as ease and popularity.) Every so often I see the box version (in which you just add hot water) at IKEA, but it’s been a while, and I’m guessing probably not one of their top-selling items.

To those who didn’t grow up eating it, it may both sound strange and taste stranger on the first sip. Jan thought the mixture tasted like pure herbal tea when he first tried it, though an increase in the ice cream-to-soup ratio quickly upped the dish’s standing in his mind.

Many years ago, when my mom and I had run out of box mixes, we successfully recreated a close relative of nypon soppa that was my childhood favorite: kräm. Kräm is a thicker version (more like a pudding than a soup), more often made with strawberries or raspberries, heated, and topped with ice cold milk. We made the pudding with fresh strawberries, sugar, and potato starch. However, since potato starch isn’t always easy to find, we decided that corn starch could probably be used in its place.

Back to the present day and missing the familiar taste of nypon soppa, my dad set out to devise his own recipe. Once the rose hips were sourced, it couldn’t get much simpler: add water, sugar and cornstarch, and then cook until thickened.

Rose hips can be purchased at Whole Foods, and more economically on Amazon.com. You can by the flakes or the powder, as both have been made from dried rose hips. With the flakes, you will have to grind them yourself, but you will be rewarded with a fresher taste (just like grinding your own spices).

At a recent family dinner, my dad prepared nypon soppa for both sides of the family (except for Jan, all of Jan’s side had never had it before). After one bite, my father-in-law was quickly reminded of picking rose hips in the Czech Republic many years before. Despite the taste being different from the usual dessert, he gave it his full approval, as did everyone else.

OR…. You could pick them and dry them yourself! Costs absolutely nothing! Granted, I’m not sure about the place where you live but here in Sweden they’re abundant! Both the wild bushes and the garden varieties. Only thing is, the seeds are a bit difficult and time consuming to get rid off… But if you ask me it’s worth it.

Btw, forgot to meantion an alternative way of cooking nyponsoppa. IF you do have rose hips growing nearby, you could also make the soup from fresh berries. A good method would be to first cut the berries in half (or smaller bits), WITHOUT removing the seed, and them boiling them (to soften them). The seeds will then float up to the surface and you can easily skim them off, eliminating the need for scraping them off, which is just not that fun to do and sometimes, not that easy, either. After boiling them and skimming off the seeds strain the berries in a sieve and KEEP the water. Then mix the strained berries with the water left from boiling and heat it up, if needed.

Err, I just want to say that I live in Sweden and I wouldn’t call this soup a dessert. It’s normal food, just as rice porridge, yoghurt or American breakfast cereal may sometimes have sugar in it but isn’t considered a dessert. (Of course you can eat it as a dessert but dessert isn’t exactly common in Sweden to begin with.) Typically you eat this soup alone for breakfast or a snack, you mix it into yoghurt, or drink it alone in a thermos while doing sports. You should use the sugar to take the edge off the bitterness, if you feel there is any, and not to make it sweet (honey works just as well, though personally I don’t feel like the soup needs any sugar). Likewise the cream you put on top shouldn’t be sweet, it should be plain “heavy cream” without sugar, as that’s what’s sold in Sweden… You are also supposed to put little cracker-like things in the soup, which I imagine you wouldn’t do in a dessert.

Also, by the way, “nypon” and “soppa” are both nouns so it’s written as one word in Swedish, “nyponsoppa”. To begin with you can just write the English name, “rose-hip soup”, as there’s no reason to use the Swedish one. The Swedish words don’t mean anything special, I mean. It seems really weird to use the random Swedish words when the post is in English and words like “soup” do exist in English, haha!

You can make it with real berries as well, which of course tastes much better than using powder but it also takes more preparation time. Simply remove the hairy parts of the berries (they’ll make your mouth itchy, if you don’t). In Sweden you can also buy rose-hip flour but the flour is not ground as fine as the powder that comes in these instant boxes, so if you want it to be exactly the same as the instant kind you’ll have to grind it down further yourself. The soup that comes in these boxes is just this finely-ground berry flour, plus potato flour (or another thickening agent), plus water. Some brands of the box-powder kind have sugar already added into them. I imagine if you were desperate you could also make this soup using rose-hip jam but who knows how that would taste in the end.

Hmm and don’t think that you have to follow the instructions on the box! I always make it with 4dl of water instead of 5dl for example, because I like mine a little thicker (so the rose-hip taste is stronger and it’s not 100% like drinking some kind of juice).

Oh yeah, and I’ll add that as far as I know, it’s more economical (saves both pantry space and money) to buy a bag of the berry flour than it is to buy these boxes of powder+potato flour combinations. So since you live abroad, I would recommend ordering the berry flour and grinding it smaller yourself. Of course if you have any access to rose-hip berry bushes then that’s the cheapest method of all : P

They also sell whole, dried berries but I’m not sure how cheap they are…